Since Normand has just migrated to Mastodon too and I'm not alone there, we can start calling ourselves a community! If you have a mastodon account, join us on #FreeCAD ! (I also just created an offical @FreeCAD@fosstodon.org account. Follow it!

For anyone wondering what the heck is Mastodon, it's a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter. The big difference is it's decentralized and open source. Many servers exist, and when you join a server (called instance), you can follow people from other instances.

Mastodon is also part of the fediverse, or federated universe, shared by other open source social media platforms such as Diaspora*, GNU Social, Friendica, PeerTube and many others; they share the same communication protocol so someone on Friendica can potentially communicate seamlessly to somebody else on a different platform. For example, I could find freecad-heini-1 profile on Peertube.mastodon.host and follow him, the next time he publishes a video on Peertube, I'll get notified on Mastodon (I think).

Mastodon is the fastest growing open source social media platform: it has over 1,860,000 users and currently gaining 25,000 new users weekly.

Mastodon.social is one of the biggest instances, with 300,000 users and the activity there (shown in a local timeline) is overwhelming. I joined the fosstodon.org instance, which as its name suggests, is geared toward FOSS (free and open source software) and has only 2,000 users.

Since Normand has just migrated to Mastodon too and I'm not alone there, we can start calling ourselves a community! If you have a mastodon account, join us on #FreeCAD ! (I also just created an offical @FreeCAD@fosstodon.org account. Follow it!